Top Ten Tuesday: top of the class

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature created and hosted by The Broke and the Bookish, in which we all talk about a bookish topic and have fun making lists. This week we’re looking at the best of the best.

I’m pretty stingy with 5 star ratings. I’m also pretty damn picky about what I read. Delightfully, last year ended up being full of brilliant reads (my top ten of 2015 were practically all 4.5 or 5 stars). There’s no point talking about exactly the same books, so I’m going to go for my top ten 5 star recent reads that haven’t already been mentioned on a Tuesday.

Best of the best

The Culture – Iain M Banks

Yes, I’m cheating, but the Minds would approve. Revisiting Consider Phlebas, The Player of Games and Use of Weapons was a highlight of 2013 and I can’t choose between them. High octane space opera, sociopolitics and snarky AI. Wonderful.

It’s not that long since I enthused about TheDarkisRisingSequence, but I want to recall Greenwitch as my unexpected favourite of the lot. Middle-class children save the world (again), with wild magic and compassion at the heart of the story.

My first taste of Yoon Ha Lee stole my heart. Fox spirits, witches and more invention than you shake a stick at couched in delectable prose. It’s poetic and mythic and moreish in perfectly bite-sized morsels.

The Woman in Black – Susan Hill

A classic with good reason, I still struggle to read this as night falls. I love the glorious faux-Victorian complexity of the language and the sheer simplicity of the haunting tale. It’s effective use of suggestion destroys me every time.

Burning Bright – Melissa Scott

How have I never enthused about this book yet? It swept me off my feet 2 years ago with its clashing cultures, political intrigue, and smouldering grudges in a colourful city where old and new technology merge seamlessly.

A time-travelling serial killer is hunted down by his only survivor, the indomitable Kirby. This is unpleasant and difficult in spades, but also life-affirming in Kirby’s rejection of damage and application of wit.

A book I can describe as awesome and made of win, and have it be both accurate and appropriate. The lady who sold it to me said it was about psychic volcanoes, but I think it’s about fatherhood and emotional fragility. It nearly broke my heart, in a good way.

A bit like The Lord of the Rings, I grew up with Watership Down and can’t be remotely objective about it. Revisiting it as an adult, I found it epic and engaging, the English countryside coming to vivid, brutal life with a lack of sentimentality that must have gone over my head as a child.

The Prestige – Christopher Priest

I love the film, but I love that the book is sufficiently different that I had no idea how it would end. Obsession, artistry, animosity and arrogance as two magicians duel for supremacy in Victorian magic.

And the other end of the spectrum

As for the worst of the worst, I’ve already read more 2 star reads in 2016 than I did in the whole of last year (if only because I was giving out half stars last year and most disappointments still scraped that extra half star). Dishonourable mentions go to Open Skies, Lagoon and Last Rituals. On the bright side, it’s now well over a year since my last 1 star read. Hooray!

What’s the best (and the worst) thing you’ve read in the last couple of years?

What a great list – I’ve read 4 of these books and completely agree that they’re brilliant so now I must check out some of your others. I think I have Consider Phlebas already on my shelves so I should perhaps take a look at that one first!
Lynn 😀

Just make sure you’re feeling resilient if you tackle Phlebas: it’s brilliant space opera, but it’s quiiiiiite bleak in a number of ways. The Player of Games and even – ironically, given its grimdark heart – Use of Weapons have more light and comedy moments.

I’ve had The Thirteenth Tale on my shelf for far too long, and just need to finally read it! Loved The Woman in Black. I really do need to read the Cooper series. I started the first book w/my son, but when he lost interest, I put it aside and never went back to it. Great list!

It had some aspects that I didn’t like, but overall I found it compelling (for all the wrong reasons: like the film, it’s a battle of two male egos; but with stage magic). Altho some of my fascination derived from how far the film strays from the book. I had to find out how it would resolve.

Omg The Prestige is a BOOK!?!??! How did I not know this?!? I adore that movie (and now feel vaguely guilty for having seen the movie first, ehhehe) so now I’m definitely going to look up the book. And I’m also glad it’s a good one. ;D
(I’m pretty picky with my 5-star ratings this year too. :O I actually have a lot of 4-stars on my list this week, but, eh. 4-stars is still good!!)

Thanks for stopping by – sadly I can’t comment on your post (the blogspot log-in won’t work for me), but I loved Persepolis (and was pretty underwhelmed by Dana Stabenow’s crime novel). I’m not familiar with the others – I do love how TTT gets us all looking outside our familiar reads! (we might as well call it TBR Top-up Tuesday)